Assessing the affordability of nutrient‐adequate diets
研究利用马拉维2013-2017年调查数据，测算家庭满足所有成员营养需求的最低成本膳食的可负担性，发现仅少数家庭能负担，且共享膳食比个体化膳食成本更高、季节性波动更大。
Abstract The cost and affordability of least‐cost healthy diets by time and place are increasingly used as a proxy for access to nutrient‐adequate diets. Recent work has focused on the nutrient requirements of individuals, although most food and antipoverty programs target whole households. This raises the question of how the cost of a nutrient‐adequate diet can be measured for an entire household. This study identifies upper and lower bounds on the feasibility, cost, and affordability of meeting all household members' nutrient requirements using 2013–2017 survey data from Malawi. Findings show only a minority of households can afford the nutrient‐adequate diet at either bound, with 20% of households able to afford the (upper bound) shared diets and 38% the individualized (lower bound) diets. Individualized diets are more frequently feasible with locally available foods (90% vs. 60% of the time) and exhibit more moderate seasonal fluctuation. To meet all members' needs, a shared diet requires a more nutrient‐dense combination of foods that is more costly and exhibits more seasonality in diet cost than any one food group or the individualized diets. The findings further help adjudicate the extent to which nutritional behavioral change programs versus broader agricultural and food policies can be relied upon to improve individual access to healthy diets.